[ajs]

Some of you probably noticed that 2.82b shipped with the ability to switch update "branch" in the config.txt file. The config option "update_branch_pin" can be changed to a value other than its default (Stable). This allows the MegaZeux updater to track a different development branch.

Today I am announcing the so-called "Unstable" branch pin, which allows you to track SVN builds of MZX. This is not for the faint hearted. SVN builds contain changes that are under constant flux and may be buggy. In addition, the world version is normally bumped, which means any games created with this version may be irreversibly backwards incompatible with the current stable version[1].

However, this is very useful for testing bug fixes and will hopefully allow me to receive more feedback about new features as they develop. You can switch Unstable back to Stable at any time by modifying the config.txt branch pin. If you are the reporter of a bug, and are asked to test the fix, you may be asked to switch pin temporarily.

This feature is currently only available on supported Windows platforms (x86, x64). All the Unstable builds contain full debugging (the download is larger; around 2MB vs 900K).

• Open config.txt and uncomment "updater_branch_pin" option;
  
• Modify parameter to "Unstable" (without quotes, case sensitive);
  
• Save and close config.txt;
  
• Start MegaZeux as normal;
  
• Press F7; MegaZeux will announce that a new major version "SVN" is available;
  
• Select "Upgrade"; wait for download to complete;
  
• If successful, it will restart. You are now on the current nightly SVN build.

--ajs.

[1] Currently, this is not the case. The world and board formats have not changed substantially since 2.51, and the "downver" tool provided in the SVN snapshots will downgrade the world to 2.82. The only features lost would be any counters introduced in SVN. However, this may change, as we're working on some fairly involved changes that do break the world format, and therefore I cannot guarantee downver will work reliably.

[mzxgiant]

I'd like to add that the auto-updater refreshes all builds from devzero at 3AM EST.

[hayashi]

Hmm. Will there be a Debian repository up for MegaZeux again at some time during the future? Seeing that the linux builds have the updater disabled and whatnot.

[ajs]

I should be able to automate the apt repository now, but over the last couple months I've overhauled almost everything to do with the ports, build system, packaging.. it's taken a while to get back to feature parity. I think it's likely that if I do this, it won't work for SVN. The updater is really a toy, best suited to the Windows platform, where writes to the install directory are likely to be possible. I might expand the updater to OS X, Amiga and GP2X at some point, but the former is quite tricky due to directory layout, and I lack testing environments for the latter two.

I am releasing deb files, if you're interested. The Ubuntu ones work on recent Debians; if your distro is too outdated they just won't install. You can get these manually from http://mzx.devzero.co.uk/snapshots/. These are built with the other platforms, nightly (assuming there were code changes that day).

--ajs.